The kindest cut

By Paul Reidinger

CORTEZ (AS in Hernán, New World conquistador, as in the alternate spelling Cortés) is one of those restaurant names that function on many levels, as lit-crit types like to say. The word subtly tends toward remembrance of things past: the restaurant occupies a space in the new Hotel Adagio that was once occupied by a restaurant, City of Paris, in a hotel called the Shannon Court, at the intersection of Geary Street and a lane called – then and now – Shannon Court.

It also resembles cortar – Spanish for "to cut" or "to shorten" – and the menu does indeed consist of small plates of Mediterranean provenance with New World inflections, as is characteristic of the restaurants of Pascal Rigo, arguably the city's most accomplished restaurateur of the past few years. (Rigo's other successes include Chez Nous and Le Petit Robert, along with Bay Bread and several boulangeries.) You might say Rigo is to restaurants what Chip Conley is to hotels; the Adagio belongs to Conley's Joie de Vivre panoply, and for Rigo to take over a hotel restaurant suggests a high degree of confidence in both the hotel and his own method.

If you remember City of Paris, which spread rather spaciously down and away from the entrance on Shannon Lane, you will find Cortez to be totally unfamiliar. The old door is still there, but the main entrance now is through the hotel lobby on Geary. The space has been narrowed (it is long and deep, like the gallery in a Pacific Heights mansion) and fitted with (in addition to a wine-hipster clientele) light fixtures that look like heavy-duty mobiles, with glass spheres of various colors hanging from them. The overall effect is of Scandinavian Designs on an acid trip.

The display kitchen seems to be more or less where it was during City of Paris days, and from it emerges a procession of the sorts of dishes that have raised Rigo to his present position of eminence. The hands-on chef is Quinn Hatfield, whose experience includes stints at Postrio, Spago in Beverly Hills, and Bouley in New York. (Hatfield's wife, Karen, is the pastry chef.) His cooking is, naturally, all about stylish little flourishes – celery foam, say, in a cappuccino-like layer atop a shot glass filled with carrot-ginger soup. The soup shots ($6 for two) reveal much about the menu as a whole: they are small but not precious, they reflect an unforced elegance, and – last but not least – they are tasty.

Onward. French fries. These ($5) would be excellent even without the doctored mayonnaises (additives include harissa and zaatar, a blend of herbs) that come on the side, and they serve equally well at the beginning or the end of the savory courses, though if they arrive at the beginning, they make a nice accompaniment to subsequent dishes. They go quite well with the various roasted fish, for instance: striped bass ($10) carved into convenient slices and served with potatoes and leeks in a meunière sauce; or branzino ($10), also a type of bass, served in a similar butter sauce with strips of charred pepper and potato coins.

If you don't like your fish cooked, Cortez has you covered: tuna tartare ($6), a dice of ruby-red nuggets, arrives on a bed of dill-scented fennel that looks like spinach fettuccine but has a chewiness that goes a bit beyond al dente. Seafood other than fish? Yes. A fat crab cake ($9), sautéed to gold with shredded phyllo dough, sits in a nest of citrus-marinated cabbage – basically a kind of high-end coleslaw whose acidity helps cut the fat. Prawns a la plancha ($10), the simple and classic Spanish preparation with garlic and chili flakes, features huge meaty prawns and a side tub of smooth, almost pastelike tapenade.

We know from Anthony Bourdain that you are a dork if you order chicken at a restaurant – even if the chicken is a slow-cooked boneless breast ($10) served with an autumnal mushroom ragout. But perhaps you are less of a dork if you are more transfixed by the mushrooms than the bird and move on to another mushroom dish, this one a fricassee of chanterelles ($9), flavored with pancetta and plumped up with exceptionally tender gnocchi and bits of parsnip, whose autumnality shades into wintriness.

We thought the butternut squash ravioli ($9) were a bit too one-dimensionally sweet. Some curry or ginger would have added interest. But their sweetness did prime the dessert pump, and the desserts themselves turned out to be quite as good as the earlier dishes. The cinnamon beignets ($7), light as clouds, were for us a foregone conclusion after my companion spotted a plate of them being served at the next table. But I was, if anything, more impressed by the chocolate peanut-butter truffle cake ($8), a kind of tiny Bundt cake whose central cavity was filled with peanut-butter mousse. And the house-made peanut-butter ice cream on the side nicely prefigured the house-made Greek yogurt sherbet – marvelously sweet-sour and creamy – that accompanied a nectarine almond brown-butter cake ($7) with which we concluded another visit. We really concluded by exchanging those nods satisfied diners exchange when the food they've just enjoyed is a cut – or two – above.